My Green Lake’s Duncan: Hyperlocal Means Shop Local
Seattle is one of the hotspots of hyperlocal blogs. Its West Seattle Blog boasts 30,000 visitors per month. Capitol Hill Seattle Blog says it gets more than 120,000 visitors per month. My Green Lake is another Seattle blog, with about 16,000 visitors each month, twice the population of the neighborhood it serves, notes its founder, Amy Duncan. Duncan, a former librarian, started the site in 2009 and runs it as a for-profit business currently featuring more than twenty neighborhood-based display ads and participating in three city-wide advertising networks.
Recently, Duncan, who manages both editorial and advertising at My Green Lake, answered a few questions by email...
An Engaged Audience Is Key to Hyperlocal Success
The true value of a hyperlocal site is its audience, but eyeballs alone aren’t enough. To create a thriving hyperlocal site today, an editor needs to attract and hold the attention of an engaged readership. Even more importantly, to sustain a hyperlocal site with limited resources, that audience needs to play an active role in providing and responding to its content.